Here’s a blast from the past: I’m pretty sure Vince Keenan, brave and
kind soul that he is, holds the record for interviewing me the most times. This
one first appeared on his site in 2011 when “One True Sentence” debuted in
hardcover. This is a slightly shortened version of that interview. You can also
reads Mr. Keenan’s review of OTS here.—Craig McDonald, October 13, 2014
It’s 1920s Paris. It’s stands
as the first Lassiter novel,
chronologically. It’s crime novelist/screenwriter Hector Lassiter at ground
zero. It’s the book in which he finds his writer’s voice, his path as a genre
author, and in which he meets the woman who more or less “invents” the
man/character of Hector Lassiter as we’ve come to know him in the three
previous novels.
How do you feel the Lost Generation of expatriate American artists in
1920s France are viewed today? What fictional works depict that era best?
I think “The Lost
Generation” has become almost a kind of brand that typifies a way of careless
and carnal living as much as the (mostly perishable) writing produced by that
generation.
As to works that catch
that world, in terms of literature, I’d go with Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,”
which poses as a memoir, but which Hemingway invites readers to regard as
fiction. I personally take the book as a mixture of fact and fiction — as much
novel as reminiscence.
My favorite film on that
era, and one that has inspired to a degree “One True Sentence” and the earlier
“Toros & Torsos,” is the Alan Rudolph film, “The Moderns.” It’s set in
mid-1920s Paris, as Hemingway is between wives and “The Sun Also Rises” is just
making its mark. It’s a mix of fictional and real characters including
Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and a scathing look at art and the tension between
life and the page (or canvas). It’s dark comedy punctuated with hot sex, a
dreamy flavor of camera work and blurring of times, all set to a terrific,
seductive score by Mark Isham.
You’ve said this book wraps up a loose trilogy within the Hector
Lassiter series about Hec’s friendship with Ernest Hemingway. What effect does
the popular conception of Hemingway have on your treatment of him as a
character? Does his larger-than-life image make it easier or more difficult to
write about him? Conversely, what challenges are posed by writing about
real-life figures who are lesser known to contemporary readers, like Ford Madox
Ford?
I try to write Hemingway
as I think he must have been — warts and all, struggling with what was probably
a fatal bi-polar condition and self-medicating as best he could with writing
and alcohol. I’m frankly astounded he survived into his sixties. I’m not sure
how widely Hem is read these days by those under, say, age 40, and if he is, I
suspect his image as a man is probably shaped by comments by partisan
professors and a few lines of biography at the back of his books.
In the 1980s, particularly
after his last wife died, there were scores of Hemingway biographies published;
a mini-series of his life in which Stacy Keach appeared. That all kind of
tapered off in the late 1990s. I don’t think a major biography of Hemingway has
appeared in the past decade or so. So I think his actual personality and
biography are receding in the collective unconscious again. A piece of trivia:
this summer will in fact mark the 50th anniversary of Hem’s death.
In terms of writing Ford
and Gertrude Stein and the like, I essentially tried to portray them in a
manner consistent with Hemingway’s portraits in “A Moveable Feast,” and,
really, as simply other characters. In that sense, “One True Sentence” was
essentially conceived to be a crime novel recasting of Hemingway’s “Feast.”
A recurring theme in the book is the distinction between literary and
genre writing, and between types within genre (crime fiction versus mystery
fiction). How seriously were such distinctions taken in the salons of 1920s Paris?
What about today?
One of the first books
Gertrude Stein gave an unknown Hemingway to read was the crime novel “The
Lodger,” Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Jack the Ripper novel. Stein regarded it as a
mystery but of a higher level than most. Hem shared her take. Stein really was
an unabashed mystery fan and called her favorite mystery writers “mystifiers.”
Hemingway biographies and letters to his publisher requesting novels to be
shipped to him include books by Ian Fleming, Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon,
among many others. Hem dug crime fiction, in his way.
The great tension of the
time — then and I guess even now — was the conflict between literary and genre
fiction. Hemingway was a critical darling when he was unpaid and writing for
little magazines and publishing with obscure presses that printed books in runs
of under 200. As soon as he signed with Scribner’s and entered the mainstream,
Hem was vilified by the Left Bank literati. Going from an Indy to a major house
can be a real risk for an author who doesn’t quiet keep a foot comfortably in
either pond, and Hem took it from several nasty directions for making that
change to a mainstream outlet. Paraphrasing, Hem said he aimed to be read by
the low- and the high-brows. And you
know, in the end, he pulled it off.
What authors inspired Hector Lassiter? Are there real-world antecedents
for Hec’s paramour and fellow writer Brinke Devlin?
Hector is a an amalgam of
various writers including James Crumley, Jonathan Latimer (a short-lived
Hemingway friend in Key West) and a couple of others I’m not quite prepared to
identify yet.
And Brinke? Brinke Devlin
is modeled on a real woman, but recast to resemble Louise Brooks and to write a
bit like Craig Rice. Brinke is, in a sense, the female version of Hector and,
as it proves out, a kind of template for Hector’s own writer’s persona. Not to
say she’s his one true love, but she is the
pivotal woman in his life, that simple.
You wrote all eight books in the Lassiter series, of which “One True
Sentence” is the fourth, before the second was published. At what point did you
realize the scale of this project? Has that scale affected the publishing
process?
I wrote the first, “Head
Games,” and figured I was done with Hector. So I wrote a standalone novel
that’s scheduled to appear later this fall (“El Gavilan”). After I finished
that, I got the idea for “Toros & Torsos” and realized it required Hector
as “hero.” From there, I just kept writing them until I knew I had completed
Hector’s arc. The ninth and last novel (“Three Chords & The Truth”) will
bring us something like full circle, finally revealing what ever happened to
Hector Lassiter. A lot of old faces will appear in that one from the first
book. It really is a circle-closer.
The tricky thing is,
because all the books exist, there’s a second-guessing and a re-sequencing that
has happened as a result of editors coming, going and changing their minds. The
first two novels followed my chosen sequence. “Print the Legend,” the
third-published novel, was originally intended to be the next-to last book. OTS
was always meant to be number three. I think we’re firmly back to my original
sequence, now. The novel that should appear after “One True Sentence” (“Forever’s
Just Pretend”) comes right off the end of OTS.
What Hector book will we be seeing next?
In terms of another novel, “Forever’s Just Pretend” is set
across several holidays in 1925 Key West. It’s a love story, centrally; very
character-driven. It’s also a bit of a change from the other books in that no
historical figures appear in the novel. What we get instead is the
deepest, hardest look into Hector Lassiter, the man, we’ve seen. It’s also the
only thing akin to a true sequel across the nine novels.
Movie Question: What’s the best cinematic adaptation of Hemingway’s
work?
That may be impossible to
answer in the sense they all pretty much blow. Nearly every one I’ve seen has
been baaad. “For Whom the Bell Tolls”
has some good moments and a stirring score. But Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman
are too old for their roles. On the other hand, that one had the courage to use
a Hemingway downbeat ending which doesn’t happen very often. “Islands in the
Stream” is kind of interesting in that George C. Scott is essentially
portraying Hemingway more than Hem’s character of Thomas Hudson. The first
version of “The Old Man and the Sea” is mostly notable only because Hem and
fourth wife Mary appear in a background scene at one point. “The Killers” is
iconic as a film noir and the only movie based on his own work Hemingway ever
really liked, but it also had to shovel on acres of material to pad out the
short story upon which it is based. I know there’s a version of “Garden of
Eden” looming, but that’s not exactly regarded as a true Hemingway novel since
it was edited to a fraction of its original length by Tom Jenks.
Baseball Question: You live in Central Ohio. Reds or Indians?
Like Hector, I’ve never
been much of a baseball fan. It was the Reds growing up, and I went to a game
or two (Cincy is 100 miles due south of my hometown). As a kid, I sat in the
stands and watched Hank Aaron phone it in at Riverfront Stadium so he could
break the home run record in his next game
in his native state — that further soured my attitude for the game, a bit. The
only televised sport I really ever watched consistently was billiards when
they’d put the old hustlers like Utley Puckett and Luther — ahem — Lassiter up against one another in the 1980s. And that, in fact, is
the man who gave Hector his surname.
Cocktail
Question: You’re in a well-stocked bar. What do you order?
Back in the day, I went through a Glenmorangie craze; some other single
malts. I got married in Scotland and sort of sampled the local fare across the
Highlands for a couple of weeks. Now it would probably just be a potent and
well-made margarita on the rocks, with salt. I’m no beer drinker, and I detest gin. Like Hector, I have an
inexplicable but deep-seated distrust
of gin drinkers.
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